Red Orchestra (espionage)
[1][2] The term was also used by the German Abwehr to refer to associated Soviet intelligence networks, working in Belgium, France, United Kingdom and the low countries, that were built up by Leopold Trepper on behalf of the Main Directorate of State Security (GRU).
[4] To this day, the German public perception of the "Red Orchestra" is characterised by the vested interest in historical revisionism of the post-war years and propaganda efforts of both sides of the Cold War.
[6] The perpetuation of the defamation from the 1940s through to the 1970s that started with the Gestapo was incorporated by the Lüneburg Public Prosecutor's Office and evaluated as a journalistic process that can be seen by the 1968 trial of Nazi judge turned far-right Holocaust denier Manfred Roeder by the German lawyer Robert Kempner.
The whole process propagated the Gestapo ideas of the Red Orchestra and this was promulgated in the report of the public prosecutor's office which stated:[6] In the course of time, a group of political supporters of different characters and backgrounds gathered around these two men and their wives.
Accordingly, the most comprehensive collection of biographies that exist are from the GDR, by Karl Heinz Biernat and Luise Kraushaar Die Schulze- Boysen- Harnack- Organisation im antifaschistischen Kampf (2002) and they represent their point of view, through the lens of ideology.
When Soviet agent Anatoly Gurevich was arrested in November 1942,[11] a small independent unit made up of Gestapo personnel known as the Sonderkommando Rote Kapelle was formed in Paris in the same month and led by SS-Obersturmbannführer (Colonel) Friedrich Panzinger.
[15] The Red Orchestra, as historically viewed in the world today, are mainly the resistance groups around the Luftwaffe officer Harro Schulze-Boysen, the writer Adam Kuckhoff and the economist Arvid Harnack, to which historians assign more than 100 people.
After his marriage to Libertas Schulze-Boysen in 1936, the couple collected young intellectuals from diverse backgrounds, including the artist couple Kurt and Elisabeth Schumacher, the writers Günther Weisenborn and Walter Küchenmeister, the photojournalist John Graudenz (who had been expelled from the USSR for reporting the Soviet famine of 1932–1933) and Gisela von Pöllnitz, the actor Marta Husemann and her husband Walter in 1938, the doctors Elfriede Paul in 1937 and John Rittmeister in Christmas 1941, the dancer Oda Schottmüller, and since Schulze-Boysen held twice-monthly meetings at his Charlottenburg atelier for thirty-five to forty people in what was considered a Bohemian circle of friends.
John Rittmeister's wife Eva was a good friend of Liane Berkowitz, Ursula Goetze, Friedrich Rehmer, Maria Terwiel and Fritz Thiel who met in the 1939 abitur class at the secondary private school, Heil'schen Abendschule at Berlin W 50, Augsburger Straße 60 in Schöneberg.
[26] In the same year, Schulze-Boysen had compiled a document about a sabotage enterprise planned in Barcelona by the Wehrmacht "Special Staff W", an organisation established by Helmuth Wilberg to analyse the tactical lessons learned by the Legion Kondor during the war.
[47] It contained texts by Walter Husemann, Fritz Lange, Martin Weise and Herbert Grasse, including information about the economic situation in Europe, references to Moscow radio frequencies, and calls for resistance.
[49] After the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, Hilde Coppi had secretly listened to Moscow radio in order to receive signs of life from German prisoners of war and to forward them to their relatives via Heinrich Scheel.
In 1936 Radó formed Geopress, a news agency specialising in maps and geographic information as a cover for intelligence work, and after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the business began to flourish.
[144] The radio stations that were known to exist were established at: Wilhelm F. Flicke, a cryptanalyst at the Cipher Department of the High Command of the Wehrmacht, worked on the message traffic created by the Swiss group during World War II.
It was action from "Special Staff W", an organisation established by Luftwaffe general Helmuth Wilberg to study and analyse the tactical lessons learned by the Legion Kondor during the Spanish Civil War.
[168] Schulze-Boysen employed the following people in his network: his wife, Libertas, who acted as his deputy; Elisabeth and Kurt Schumacher, who were close contacts; Eva-Maria Buch, who worked in the German Institute of Foreign Affairs; Oda Schottmüller and Erika von Brockdorff, who used their houses for radio operations; Kurt Schulze, radio matters; Herbert Engelsing, an informant; Günther Weisenborn, who produced Nazi commissions for Joseph Goebbels,[169] John Graudenz, whose work as a salesman to the Luftwaffe allowed him to visit most airfields.
[187] In 1934, John Sieg and Robert Uhrig met Wilhelm Guddorf and sinologist Philipp Schaeffer while imprisoned in Luckau prison in Brandenburg,[188] later making contact with KPD officials when released from concentration camp.
[216] Arnould, recalled the agents, regularly read the same books and was able to identify the name of one as Le miracle du Professeur Wolmar by Guy de Téramond[220] After scouring most of Europe for the correct edition, a copy was found in Paris on 17 May 1942.
[101] Two messages waiting to be enciphered were discovered in the house that contained details of such startling content, the plans for Case Blue, that Abwehr officer Henry Piepe immediately drove to Berlin from Brussels to report to German High Command.
[132] A meeting was arranged between Walter Schellenberg, Egbert Bentivegni, Wilhelm Canaris and Hans Kopp to discuss the situation and it was decided the Gestapo would be solely responsible for exposing the group in Berlin.
[275] To facilitate the operation, Hitler had given permission to pass on messages in coordination with the Reich Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht, even if it fulfilled the definition of treason.
[314] Himpel's fiancé Maria Terwiel who had helped copy and distribute the Agis leaflet, and had written handbills and put up posters against the Nazi propaganda "Soviet Paradise" exhibition, was guillotined at Plötzensee on 5 August.
[343] In 1946, the German historian and author, Ricarda Huch publicly called for contributions to her planned collection of biographies of executed resistance fighters Für die Märtyrer der Freiheit (For the Martyrs of Freedom).
Helmut Kohl wrote in a letter to Harro's brother Hartmut Schulze-Boysen in 1987 that the German resistance consisted of the group around Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and the White Rose, that the Red Orchestra did not belong to it.
On 6 October 1969, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR posthumously awarded the Order of the Red Banner to Harro Schulze-Boysen, Arvid Harnack, Adam Kuckhoff, Ilse Stöbe and Hansheinrich Kummerow.
[369] In 1970, a DEFA feature film KLK an PTX... was released that portrayed the official histories of the Red Orchestra as a group dependent on the anti-fascism of the KPD and therefore only capable of joint action.
[370] The 1979 book Rote Kapelle gegen Hitler[371] by Soviet military historian Alexander Blank and Stasi officer Julius Mader is used today as an example of a manipulated historiography.
[382] In 2009, a study by American political scientist Anne Nelson that was published as a book, came to the following conclusions:[383] Johannes Tuchel, Director of the Memorial to the German Resistance commented on the astonishing agreement between the east and the west, in the reception that the group received.
[385] The theologian Karl Barth made a rare exception to the West German assessment of the 1950s when he declared the group to be a model of the church resistance because of its openness to people from different social classes, its efforts to protect Jews and the timely clarification of the War Plans of the Nazi's.
In 1941, he created Rote Kapelle Berlin, his famous painting that is located in the Stadtmuseum in Münster in which he portrays Harro Schulze-Boysen, Walter Küchenmeister and Kurt Schumacher building a bridge away from Nazism.
